5 Ways to Check the Amount of Free Space on Your Mac

Sometimes you might want to know how much free space is left on your Mac’s internal drive. For example, if you have a large file to download or several movies and videos to transfer to your Mac, it helps to have an idea of ​​the available space.

This handy tutorial will show you five easy ways to check the free space on your Mac. You can also use these methods to find out the free space of an external drive connected to your Mac.

1. Open the About This Mac window

Here’s the easiest way to check how much free space is available on your Mac:

  1. Click it Apple icon () at the top left of the screen and choose About This Mac.
  2. Go to Storage.
  3. It will show the total size of free space available on your Mac’s internal drive or other currently connected drives.

2. Check system information

System Information is another built-in tool that makes it incredibly easy to get the storage details of your Mac’s hard drive, SSD, or any other connected drive. Here’s how:

  1. While holding the Option key, click the Apple icon () at the top left of the screen.
  2. Click on System information.
  3. expand the Material section.
  4. Click on Storage to see your disk capacity, free space and other related information.

3. Use Get Info in Finder

For this to work, make sure you’ve chosen to show your Mac’s drive in the Finder sidebar. If not, open Searcherand click Finder > Preferences from the menu bar. Then click on Lateral bar and make sure the name of your Mac is selected under Pitches

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Once done, follow these steps to view storage information:

  1. Click on the name of your Mac in the Finder sidebar, under Pitches.
  2. Control-click the main volume and click Obtain informations.
  3. expand the General to see total capacity and what’s available.

You can follow the same steps to see available space for any other connected USB drive, HDD, SSD, etc. If you’re having trouble, here’s a guide to fixing external drives not showing up on a Mac.

4. Use Quick Look on Desktop

You can use Quick Look in the Finder or on the desktop. But for that, first make sure you’re in the Finder, and in the top menu bar, click Finder > Preferences. Then activate HDDs of Show these items on the desktop part of the General tongue. It will now start showing your Mac’s internal drive icon on the desktop.


Once the internal drive icon appears on your Mac desktop, click on it to select it and press Space. This will show you the total storage size and what is still available in the Quick Look popup window.

5. Run a terminal command

If you’re comfortable with Terminal, you can use a command to find out how much free space is available on your Mac. Start by opening Terminal on your Mac. After that, type or copy and paste the following command and press the Walk in key:

df -h

It will display the sizes of your various Mac volumes. In most cases, the numbers of /System/Volumes/Data will be the one that represents the amount of used and unused space for your primary volume.

Optionally, you can copy this file path from Terminal (/System/Volumes/Data), go to Finder, press Cmd + Shift + Gpaste the location of the copied folder and press the Walk in to see the volume whose drive data was displayed.


Check your Mac’s free space

These are all the ways you can use the built-in macOS tools to check the total free space of your Mac’s internal drive and any other drives connected to it. While these tips are handy for the most part, if you’re looking to dig deeper, you can use one of the many third-party apps that help you check disk space on your Mac.


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Top 5 Free Apps to Check Disk Space Storage on Mac

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